


Okay, We're Alright

by redonthefly



Series: So No One Told Me [4]
Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:07:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2566079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Someday, someday, Kristoff," he’d said, "someday some woman is going to set your heart on fire like that, light up your whole life. You’ll know it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Okay, We're Alright

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place some time after Date Material.

Kristoff asks Anna to marry him on a Sunday night in March, when they’re sitting around her rickety dining table eating slightly freezer-burnt moose tracks ice cream out of the carton because all of the bowls are dirty, piled high in the sink. Their knees bump occasionally under the cheap particle board, invisible because of Anna’s cheerful tablecloth, stocking feet stacked lazily together in the middle. It’s still cold outside - spring hasn’t quite made it to New York - and the baseboard heating really isn’t working well enough for ice cream, but Anna had opened the fridge, grimaced, opened the freezer, grimaced again, and finally pulled the old and bent carton out from behind a few sacks of frozen corn.

"Elsa would be appalled," she’d joked, forgoing the ice cream scoop for slightly misshapen spoons, and dropped the whole thing as a sticky mess right on the green paisley patterned cotton. "Dinner’s up!"

"You only have this because you’ve been too busy actually  _eating_ Elsa’s ice cream,” he’d said, but reached for the carton anyway. “Hers never lasts more than a day or two.”

"It’s this or week old stir-fry; Weselton’s is closed," she said, citing Arendelle’s lonely pizza parlor (greasy, slightly overpriced, not open after 8PM and still somehow insanely popular with the hoards of local college students) before dropping into the seat opposite.

"I’ll take my chances with the ice cream."

Anna grinned at him around her spoon, and kicked him gently under the table, and so they dug in like little kids, chasing each other’s spoons away from the best bits, each trying to get the most fudge.

About half way through, when they’re just a little bit chilled and sugary, and Anna is drawing circles in the melted river of chocolate and peanut butter on the lid, Kristoff realizes suddenly, with the steady, assured conviction of a man who knows - who  _knows_ \- that he could eat grainy old ice cream forever, if it were with her, if it were like this, cold and sticky and way too late, if he could see her smile and watch her draw snowmen with a teaspoon, if it were Anna, only her.

He sits up a little straighter in his chair, and swallows hard.

"So I think we should get married," Kristoff says.

Anna drops her spoon on the floor.

For a few long minutes they stare at each other, eyes held under the yellowing florescent light, amidst the dirty pots and pans and bowls in the sink, the cheap linoleum flooring, the shaggy green rug that Anna had liberated from a thrift store, the one Kristoff thinks looks like a skinned Muppet, the one she thinks looks like spring grass to dig her toes into, and the old-style advertisements for European castle vacations, ripped out of magazines and carefully framed and hung on the bare walls.

Anna says, “Oh,” and licks her lips.

Kristoff says, “Um,” and tries to think, can’t think, can’t move, can’t barely _breathe_ , sitting in the too small chair in the too small kitchen, watching Anna lean down to pick up the spoon.

After another long inhale, she stands, pushes in her chair and stalls, absently reaching for one of her braids. She fiddles with it when she’s nervous, Kristoff knows. He knows it’s always the one on the right, the one with the silver blonde streak. He knows exactly how she’ll wind it between her fingers, fluff the free end under her chin as she thinks.

He knows she loves chocolate in all forms except for Kit Kats, which she inexplicably hates. He knows that the scar on her chin is from falling out of an apple tree when she was very little, and that cheap detergent will make her break out in hives, he knows why she still walks with a little bit of a limp when she’s tired, when exactly it was that she broke her ankle skateboarding down the hall of her apartment complex in the middle of the night, and he knows that their first kiss was in a parking lot at 2 in the morning, and that’s how he knows that she can eat her weight in maple pancakes. He knows she wears her mother’s wedding ring on her right hand, and that her sister Elsa wears their father’s on a necklace, that Elsa is her favorite person on the planet probably, but that they’re complicated in the way sisters can be sometimes, learning how to love each other close instead of at a distance.

"I know," Kristoff, scrambling, "I know that it’s kind of soon, and I, I mean. Um."

Anna just gives him a funny look, chewing on her lips, one hand not quite resting, hovering hear the table, like she wants to lean on it but isn’t sure.

"I don’t want to be like him," he says finally, gently. "You can say no, if you want. Obviously."

"I never thought you were," she says pointedly. "I’m just. Well. Okay, so I’m a little  _surprised_ , yeah, but Elsa warned me, and - “

"Wait, Elsa  _warned_ \- “

"She said I should expect it, because big sisters  _see_ , and I didn’t even know what she thinks she even  _means_ by that, but. Here we are.”

"Yes," Kristoff mutters into his hands. "Here we are. Look, Anna, I’m sorry, just forget - "

"I never said no," she interrupts, and puts one hand on his shoulder. It’s warm, grounding as ever, a comfort even when he feels like crawling under the table. "I don’t think you’re anyone but Kristoff, and I was just - a little surprised, I think - but, I haven’t said no."

"What are you saying then?" He asks, and his heart is beating staccato in his chest. His grandfather liked to tell a story about the day he met his grandmother, and the yellow sweater she wore, and how he’d seen her working the till at a little shop in their town that sold lamps, and how she’d looked up and smiled like the sun, like an actual ray of sunshine on a grey afternoon.

"Someday, someday, Kristoff," he’d said, "someday some woman is going to set your heart on fire like that, light up your whole life. You’ll know it."

Kristoff remembers the smile on his face, the wry twist of his lips, the  _knowing_. “Will I now,” he said, cynical and sarcastic and seventeen, shuffling a deck of playing cards and dealing them a hand of Rummy.

"You will," he replied. "Don’t shuffle like a troll; let me show you."

Kristoff looks at Anna and he sees the sun.

He sees at her with oversized glasses, studying; he sees her rifling through donation boxes at the local thrift shop; he sees her complaining about the cold and wriggling in excitement over the season’s first snow; sees her pacing the hallway with her phone wedged under her chin listening to Elsa talk; he sees her eating ice cream for dinner, and teasing him for aggressively scooping out the lumps of peanut butter.

He looks at her now, and he sees her shining, radiant and shy, glowing pink in her cheeks.

"I think I’m saying - I know -” she pauses, and suddenly smiles full, wide and bright, “that I’m saying  _yes_.”

**Author's Note:**

> (reposted from it's original home as part of my 30daychallenge fics so I can associate it with the series)


End file.
